"The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs every day." -- Marcel Proust

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

An advertisement for Alan Furst.

Brad DeLong recommends Alan Furst's Dark Star to those who don't understand that history needn't have turned out as it did. DeLong emphasizes one of the things I like most about Furst's novels: the sense of contingency, that things might have gone differently, that the war was not ordained to end as it did.

Truthfully, I've liked all of them, so perhaps I'm not a good guide. I read them in the sequence he wrote them, and I think he hit his stride with the third -- in the first, you could sort of see him feeling his way around the genre and the possibilities, and in the second, the plot was a little too ornate. With the third, I think he decided that his strengths were not in constructing elaborate, fantastical plots, and he wisely stopped trying to outdo himself.

I haven't read the one that's just out in hardback. I wasn't crazy about Blood of Victory, perhaps because he didn't find enough in Istanbul to work with. I likedDark Voyage, which I believe was the last before the one that's just out.

That leaves a bunch in the middle, but I'm not sure which box they're in and I'm too tired to figure it all out on the web just now (time for bed).

This comment has some links. I've never used a RSS reader, and was just wondering yesterday whether I should get around to figuring the technology out. Can you sell me on it?